Wildlife officials encourage hunters to help thin the population of CWD, but some hunters may be taking it beyond what is legal according to regulations. (Photo by Dr. Beth Williams, University of Wyoming, courtesy of CWD Alliance)
In states with deer herds affected by Chronic Wasting Disease, wildlife officials have
encouraged hunters to help them thin the population. But some wardens worry that
poachers are taking this as an invitation to bag game any way they can. Brian Bull
reports:
Transcript
In states with deer herds affected by Chronic Wasting Disease, wildlife officials have
encouraged hunters to help them thin the population. But some wardens worry that
poachers are taking this as an invitation to bag game any way they can. Brian Bull
reports:
It’s illegal to shoot deer at night, from vehicles, or while trespassing. But that’s something
Wisconsin game warden David Youngquist has seen recently. He monitors that state’s
Chronic Wasting Disease eradication zone. Youngquist says in that area, there are nearly
six times as many deer as is healthy for the herd:
“Our agency feels that if we can get deer numbers down, we can halt the disease. But we
still enforce the road hunting the same as we ever
have. We want hunting to be safe.”
Youngquist says poaching activities are on the rise, because some people think bagging a
deer is the main thing, whether it’s done legally or not. In some of these eradication
zones, a record number of citations have been handed out.
Fluids from de-icers and anti-icers can end up in creeks and lakes, harming the aquatic life that dwell there. (Photo courtesy of the EPA)
A new study indicates fluids used to remove or prevent ice buildup on planes can still be
harmful to aquatic life. But the research shows some of the chemicals are more toxic
than others. Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
A new study indicates fluids used to remove or prevent ice buildup on planes can still be
harmful to aquatic life. But the research shows some of the chemicals are more toxic
than others. Chuck Quirmbach reports:
The US Geological Survey has been testing the different fluids used as de-icers and anti-
icers on airplanes. The solutions often flow into storm sewers that end up in creeks and
lakes. Researcher Steve Corsi says when the products are used during extreme weather
conditions, they can build up in the environment:
“Intense freezing rains are usually the worst ones. Where you might see a little bit higher
concentration, there’s more risk.”
So the federal agency exposed minnows, algae and other sensitive aquatic organisms to
the de-icers and anti-icers. Corsi says de-icers are not as toxic as they used to be but anti-
icers that prevent ice buildup on airplanes are still toxic. The results of the tests are being
sent to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is considering restrictions on how
the fluids are used.
Wood used to build decks or play structures is treated with chemicals to keep the wood
from rotting. Some of these chemicals caused health concerns and were phased out of the
market. But now one company wants to use a chemical that brings up more health
concerns. Mark Brush reports the EPA has rejected the company’s first bid:
Transcript
Wood used to build decks or play structures is treated with chemicals to keep the wood
from rotting. Some of these chemicals caused health concerns and were phased out of the
market. But now one company wants to use a chemical that brings up more health
concerns. Mark Brush reports the EPA has rejected the company’s first bid:
The Forest Products Research Lab asked the EPA to approve the use of acid copper
chromate as a wood preservative, but the preservative contains a chemical known to
increase the risk of cancer when it’s inhaled.
Jim Jones is the Director of the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs. He says it’s mostly
a risk to workers who treat the wood in the factory, but it can also cause rashes on people
who handle the wood:
“Let’s say, for example, you work in a retail outlet and you’re involved in sort of moving
it around or you build a deck in the backyard or fencing. For those individuals they run
some risk of dermal sensitization.”
Jones says the risk is low. Only about 2 out of one hundred people are sensitive to the
exposure, but he says the risk to workers and consumers was high enough for the EPA to
reject the company’s bid.
A new study finds low doses of a chemical used in plastics increases developmental
defects in mice. Rebecca Williams reports the study adds to the growing body of
research that has some scientists wondering if there are human health effects:
Transcript
A new study finds low doses of a chemical used in plastics increases developmental
defects in mice. Rebecca Williams reports the study adds to the growing body of
research that has some scientists wondering if there are human health effects:
The chemical’s called bisphenol A. It’s used to make everything from plastic baby bottles
to the lining of food cans.
The researchers exposed pregnant mice to the chemical. They found that the female
babies those mice were carrying were more likely to have eggs with chromosome defects.
So it’s a three-generational effect. Exposure in the pregnant female mouse increases the
likelihood her grandchildren will have defects.
Patricia Hunt is an author of the study, published in the Public Library of Science
Genetics. She notes this is an animal study and humans are more complex:
“But we also need to bear in mind that this is one chemical of many that have these
effects, they can mimic the actions of hormones in the body.”
Hunt says there’s a growing level of concern among scientists that the developing fetus
might be especially sensitive to chemicals that mimic hormones.
The migrant children spend a lot of time with their families. In their culture, life revolves around family and community events. (Photo by Gary Harwood )
Educators say most migrants need more schooling to improve their lives, but foreign-
born Hispanic students have the highest dropout rate in the US. (Photo by Gary Harwood )
When the growing season comes to an end, migrant workers' children are pulled out of school and often don't return until the end of the school year. (Photo by Gary Harwood )
Lots of farm workers in the U.S. are migrants from Mexico and other southern places.
Many farm owners say they couldn’t be profitable growing food without these migrants.
But the workers are growing something of their own: children. The children are often uprooted. Julie Grant reports on the challenges of educating children whose lives are dictated by the growing season:
Transcript
Lots of farm workers in the U.S. are migrants from Mexico and other southern places.
Many farm owners say they couldn’t be profitable growing food without these migrants.
But the workers are growing something of their own: children. The children are often
uprooted. Julie Grant reports on the challenges of educating children whose lives are
dictated by the growing season:
In this farm town another house or trailer empties nearly every night. The growing season
is over and migrant workers are leaving, headed to Florida, Texas, Mexico, or someplace
else. That means their children will be pulled out of school. Cyndee Farrell is principal
of the elementary school:
“They’ll just not show up. Sometimes we get word, ‘Oh, we’re leaving tomorrow.’ Other
times, if the weather changes over the weekend or whatever happens and they just decide,
oh, we’re going to leave, they pack up and go. They know they can count on us being here when
they return, and we make it work.”
The migrant children leave as most students are just settling in to the semester.
For some migrants, it’s the only schooling they’ll get until they return to Ohio in April or
May, just a few weeks before the end of the school year.
Lisa Hull teaches reading to 4th and 5th graders. She says the migrants add a whole new
culture to this rural school. They laugh a lot and almost always seem happy.
But she says they don’t treat the classroom like the American kids:
“They don’t value education as well as i would say a normal, typical American would.
They have a different lifestyle. They’re easy going. We’re into all the possessions and
stuff, whereas they don’t really care if they have anything.”
The migrant children spend a lot of time with their families. The families are close and
they stay close. In their culture, life revolves around family and community events. One
person’s birthday is usually reason enough for an entire migrant neighborhood to
celebrate.
(Sound of knocking on door)
“Where is everybody?”
It’s Friday night and neighbor Pat Moore drops in on the Soto Family. They’ve just come
in from weeding lettuce in the fields. They’ve been migrating to rural Ohio from outside
Mexico City for more than a decade. The three ‘boys’ are all grown now and have
become U.S. citizens. They all graduated from Mexican high schools. 21 year-old
Alberto Soto also wanted a diploma from an American high school, so he stayed in this
town of Hartville on his own one winter:
“That year, I saw the snow for my first time. Here, it was too cold.”
The whole family is gathered in the living room: all three brothers, two younger sisters.
The mother and father don’t speak English, but they sit and listen, as Alberto Soto
explains why he stayed in Ohio that year:
“To finish my high school, I was in 12th grade. So I think that was important for me.
To get my diploma so I can get a better job, so they can pay me more. An easy job. Not
too hard like in the fields.”
Soto says he cried when his family left. He was lonely. But even after staying that
winter, he still hadn’t learned enough to graduate. He quit school and he’s been working
in the fields with his family since then. His 19 year-old brother Marco Soto has also
become an expert at weeding lettuce. Marco says it’s hard, boring work and he wants to
do something else:
“I think everything is going to be the same every year. And you are not going to learn something to do something because here, is almost the same. Like what you do everyday is going to be the same, like if you want to stay here for the rest of your life, it’s gonna be the same thing and you are not going to learn anything.”
Educators say most migrants need more schooling to improve their lives, but foreign-
born Hispanic students have the highest dropout rate in the U.S. The migrant
neighborhoods in the Hartville area are looking dark these days, but they’ll spring back to
life when the growing season begins again. The public school teachers say they’ll do
their best to keep working with the students who return.
Most migrant labor camps provide housing only for single men, but the Zellers farm in Hartville, OH allows entire families to migrate and, for those of age, to work together in the fields. (Photo by Gary Harwood )
Often, two or more generations of families work together on the Zellers farm. (Photo by Gary Harwood )
In Ohio, and nationally, migrant workers have an annual net income of $11,000-14,000, but despite this statistic, seasonal work in the US provides better opportunities for these workers than in Mexico or other Latin American countries. (Photo by Gary Harwood )
It might sound obvious, but America needs to grow and harvest food. The problem is
that many Americans don’t want to work on farms anymore. That’s why some farm
owners recruit workers from Mexico and other places. During the growing season,
nearly 300 workers and their children live in migrant camps around the K. W. Zellers
family farm in rural northeast Ohio. Julie Grant spent some time at the Zellers’ farm this
fall and has this story:
Transcript
It might sound obvious, but America needs to grow and harvest food. The problem is
that many Americans don’t want to work on farms anymore. That’s why some farm
owners recruit workers from Mexico and other places. During the growing season,
nearly 300 workers and their children live in migrant camps around the K. W. Zellers
family farm in rural northeast Ohio. Julie Grant spent some time at the Zellers’ farm this
fall and has this story:
For many Americans, just tending a small garden can be too much labor. But the
Mexican workers on the Zellers Farm in Hartville, Ohio are moving quickly down rows
of lettuce hundreds of yards long.
One man crouches down and cuts four heads of romaine. He’s leaning over the plants all
day long. It’s backbreaking work, but he moves spryly to the next row, and the next, and
the next. He’ll only make about 3 cents per head, so he wants to cut as many heads as
quickly as possible. Another worker follows him, loading the lettuce into boxes, then
lifting the 30 to 40 pound boxes and throwing them on to a flatbed truck, one after
another.
Farm owner Jeff Zellers says most people who live around here don’t want to do this:
“No. We can probably hire ten people and one of them will last more than a week, who
will stay here work, and work through it.”
Out in another field, a different crew is working in the harshest heat of the day. They get
a little protection from straw hats and some are wearing rubber pants. They need to protect
their legs from the hot, black, mucky soil. The temperature of the dirt can get up to 110
degrees.
Two generations of the Soto family of Mexico work together thinning lettuce. They
work down the long rows using a hoe, or crouching down and pulling out weeds by hand.
25-year-old Ivan Soto has become an expert, after thinning lettuce at the Zellers farm for
the past nine years:
“We don’t do other jobs, only one job.”
Ivan Soto pretty much taught himself English. He’s gone through the process to become
a US citizen. Now his wife has joined him and his family on the lettuce-thinning crew.
Other crews specialize in growing cilantro, parsley, and radishes. Zellers says the farm
depends on this expertise:
“We have to deliver
product on a daily basis that is as good or better then our competitors. And if we do not
have a trained labor force to do that, we’re not going to long term be in business.”
The Zellers farm pays less then some others because it has set up temporary homes
around the perimeter of the farm. Most of the homes look like small trailers. But they
come furnished and the farm pays most of the workers’ living expenses. Most migrant
farm workers make 11 to 14 thousand dollars a year. Ivan Soto says it’s hard, boring
work, but they make a good enough living that when they return to Mexico they can
afford to rest for awhile.
That’s a big reason their family, including his wife and young son, his parents, four
siblings, an aunt and uncle, have traveled from their home outside Mexico City to this
small northeast Ohio town for going on a decade now:
“When we are here, we say, well, we are now in our second home, because over there is our first home this is our home because here in Ohio is our second home for us.”
While most farms provide migrant housing only for single men,
Jeff Zellers allows entire families to migrate and work together in the fields. He hopes
his own children understand all the labor it takes to provide a meal:
“When we return thanks before we eat dinner, we pray for the people that prepared and produced the food. If my childen do nothing else but understand that their food did not show up in the grocery store because that’s where it was, it just came off an assembly line, I would want them to do that.”
This week, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit opens to the public. Every year, the event is a showcase for the newest trends for tomorrow’s cars and trucks, and this year, the big trend is fuel-efficient vehicles. Cleaner cars have been promised before, but Dustin Dwyer reports that this year’s green car concepts could be more than just an attempt to polish up a dirty image for the auto industry:
Transcript
This week, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit opens to the public.
Every year, the event is a showcase for the newest trends for tomorrow’s cars and trucks,
and this year, the big trend is fuel-efficient vehicles. Cleaner cars have been promised
before, but Dustin Dwyer reports that this year’s green car concepts could be more than
just an attempt to polish up a dirty image for the auto industry:
The press previews for this year’s Detroit auto show were made up of three straight days
of back-to-back new product launches. Dozens of new vehicles were unveiled. Hundreds
of glossy brochures were offered to reporters, and nothing generated as much interest as
the new Chevrolet Volt concept vehicle:
(Sound of buzzing)
A packed crowd gathered for the flashy and noisy unveiling. GM executives announced
that the concept car could run up to 40 miles without using a single drop of fuel. It runs
instead on electricity cranked out by its next-generation lithium-ion batteries. When the
liquid fuel system eventually does kick in, it recharges the battery for better fuel
economy, getting up to 150 miles per gallon.
And as GM CEO Rick Wagoner told the audience, the Chevy Volt represents a new way
of thinking for the world’s largest automaker. It comes from a realization that oil alone is
highly unlikely to supply enough energy for all of tomorrow’s vehicles:
“For the global auto industry, this means that we must as a business necessity, develop
alternative sources of propulsion based on alternative sources of energy in order to meet the
world’s growing demand for our products.”
GM wasn’t the only automaker to unveil a fuel conscious vehicle at this year’s auto show.
Ford’s Airstream concept, and Toyota’s FT-HS sports car concept both featured hybrid
style powertrain systems, backed by a lithium-ion battery.
It might not be all that surprising for automakers to release such vehicles after a year in
which gas prices surged beyond three dollars a gallon, but analyst Jim Hall of Auto
Pacific says gas prices aren’t the reason for automakers to get into low or no emission
vehicles.
“You do it for two reasons, one, the potential of getting out of the business of making a
mechanical engine that has to be machined and made of multiple pieces and assembled,
and the other part of it is, you never have to spend another penny on emissions controls,
and emissions research, and emissions development and emissions engineering, which, at
every major car company is billions of dollars.”
So, basically, greener technology will eventually be cheaper technology. That means that
for perhaps the first time in the history of the auto industry, the interests of
environmentalists and the interest of business-minded bean counters are finally in line.
The big question now is how to get to that greener future. The concepts at this year’s
Detroit auto show all point to lithium-ion batteries as the next frontier. These batteries
are more powerful, and potentially cheaper than the batteries in today’s hybrids, but
they’re also less stable, and don’t last as long.
GM executives say they think they can resolve those issues and have a lithium-ion
powered vehicle by the end of the decade, but Jim Hall says no way:
“I worked on an electric vehicle program when I was employed in the auto industry
directly, and I learned that there are three kinds of liars in the world. There are liars,
damn liars and battery engineers.”
Of course, not everyone agrees with Hall’s assessment. Some lithium-ion proponents
even argue that the technology could be ready to go right now. Ford, General Motors and
the Chrysler Group have asked the federal government for more funding to speed-
development of lithium-ion batteries.
They say the Japanese government is giving its car companies several hundred million
dollars for battery development, and they want a comparable effort from the US
government. But even if Detroit automakers don’t get the money, almost everyone agrees
that big changes are coming for the auto industry, and that decades-long battle between
the good of the environment and the good of carmakers could be coming to a close.
An invasive insect that has hurt forests in eastern states for more than 50 years is spreading to northern forests. Richie Duchon reports officials think it came by way of out-of-state nurseries:
Transcript
An invasive insect that has hurt forests in eastern states for more than 50 years is spreading to
northern forests. Richie Duchon reports officials think it came by way of out of state nurseries:
The tiny bug kills hemlock trees. The Hemlock Wooly Adelgid makes the trees weak and
vulnerable to droughts. Most of them die within ten years.
Mike Phillip is with the Michigan Department of Agriculture. He says this is an important time
of year for finding the adelgid.
“It begins to become active and will develop a white cottony, fluffy surrounding for its body. It’s
called an ova sac. And that is where it gets its name Wooly Adelgid. And that is an important
stage for us, because that’s where it becomes visible to us, and we can really get an idea of the
size of an infestation and what we’re really facing.”
Hemlocks are an important tree in forests, because they make good habitat for birds and animals.
A dealer in plant fertilizers is getting top dollar for product that he gathers close to home. Fred Kight reports some gardeners are just bats for the nutrient:
Transcript
A dealer in plant fertilizers is getting top dollar for product that he gathers close to home. Fred
Kight reports some gardeners are just bats for the nutrient:
What sells for 14 dollars a pound, comes from church steeples and is a fantastic plant fertilizer?
It’s bat poop. Or, more properly, bat guano.
Matt Peters says he already was selling worm dung as a plant food.
When nearby church leaders called him about their bat dropping problems, he added the guano to
the fertilizer inventory of his Ohio business. Peters says some customers are attracted by the
novelty… while others just want healthy plants:
“Definitely in my own personal trials I’ve been amazed at the power of bat guano. I never knew
green could be so green.”
Peters says the original manufacturers, so to speak, of his guano eat mosquitoes.
Since mosquitoes are nitrogen-rich, so is the bat guano… and plants love nitrogen.
The recent appearance of a new invasive species shows just how easily an even worse invader could make its way into the Great Lakes. Rebecca Williams reports the invaders are hitching a ride in the ballast water of foreign ships:
Transcript
The recent appearance of a new invasive species shows just how easily an
even worse invader could make its way into the Great Lakes. Rebecca
Williams reports the invaders are hitching a ride in the ballast water of
foreign ships:
The new shrimp that’s here is called the bloody red mysid. Scientists say
the shrimp eat tiny organisms at the bottom of the food web… and could
compete with fish for food.
Steve Pothoven is a fisheries biologist with the Great Lakes Environmental
Research Lab. He discovered thousands of the shrimp near Lake Michigan.
“They’re originally from the Ponto-Caspian region, which is the Black and
Caspian Seas. The Ponto-Caspian is the same region that zebra mussels,
quaggas mussels are from, gobies, so that’s the region we’ve got a lot of
the more recent well known invaders.”
Scientists have an eye out for another invader from that same region. It’s
called the killer shrimp. It’s known for biting and shredding its victims…
and doesn’t always eat what it kills. Some scientists are worried if it
gets in, the killer shrimp could cause even more devastation to the Great
Lakes food web.
Wildlife officials encourage hunters to help thin the population of CWD, but some hunters may be taking it beyond what is legal according to regulations. (Photo by Dr. Beth Williams, University of Wyoming, courtesy of CWD Alliance)
